Article

Ho! Ho! Who? Parent promotion of belief in and live encounters with Santa Claus

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

... For example, children and adults believe in the existence of bacteria or vitamins even though these entities are, under normal circumstances, unobservable Shtulman, 2013). Many children also believe in the existence of supernatural entities such as the Tooth Fairy, God, or the soul even though they too are, under normal circumstances, unobservable (Goldstein & Woolley, 2016;Guerrero, Enesco & Harris, 2010;Richert & Harris, 2006;Shtulman, 2013). As these examples illustrate, belief in the unobservable includes phenomena that fall within the domains of both natural as well as supernatural phenomena. ...
... Moreover, older children were more likely than younger children to believe in her reality status. Such an inferential strategy of using both explicit and implicit testimonial cues is likely to be effective whether children are learning about natural scientific or endorsed supernatural phenomena (see also Goldstein & Woolley, 2016;Prentice et al., 1978;Rosengren, Kalish, Hickling & Gelman, 1994). ...
... We have shown that the influence of both testimony and physical possibility is relatively consistent across entities and events that are not typically seen as similar: scientific, quasi-historical, and supernatural endorsed. One challenge, of course, is that whereas belief in some supernatural agentssuch as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairyappears to decrease with age (Blair, McKee & Jernigan, 1980;Goldstein & Woolley, 2016;Prentice, Manosevitz & Hubbs, 1978;Sharon & Woolley, 2004), belief in God as a supernatural agent is often sustained. Indeed, research indicates that belief in God as a supernatural agent increases with age (Barrett, Richert & Driesenga, 2001; Giménez-Dasí, Guerrero & Harris, 2005;Kelemen, 2004;Lane, Wellman & Evans, 2010Legare, Evans, Rosengren, & Harris, 2012;Rottman & Kelemen, 2012) and that adult religious beliefs often exceed those of children (Legare et al., 2012)despite the fact that an adult understanding of physical possibility is arguably more sophisticated than that of children. ...
Chapter
In the current chapter, we focus on how children come to develop concepts about things they cannot observe for themselves. We argue that the formation of belief in the unobservable—which includes entities that are difficult or impossible to experience first-hand—arises primarily through the testimony from trusted adults. We note that the impact of testimony is similar for both natural (e.g., scientific or historical facts) and supernatural (e.g., God, Santa Claus) concepts. We suggest that children’s own developing understanding of physical possibility constrains the impact of testimonial information, leading to differences in how children come to think of natural and supernatural unobservables. Finally, we present a broader perspective of testimony’s role in children’s concept formation, examining the known and potential impacts of the community and cultural consensus.
... Many U.S. children believe in the existence of cultural fantastical beings who possess impossible attributes and perform impossible actions (e.g., Santa Claus; Goldstein & Woolley, 2016). This might suggest that children would believe in other impossible things, like selectively invisible clothes, or improbable things, like tigers running through city streets. ...
Article
In this study, we ask whether consensus testimony affects children’s judgments of the possibility of improbable and impossible events. Fifty-six U.S. and Chinese 8-year-olds made possibility judgments before and after hearing three speakers affirm or deny the possibility of improbable and impossible events. Results indicated that whereas both U.S. and Chinese children altered their judgments in the direction of the consensus testimony, this effect was stronger for Chinese children. U.S. children were particularly receptive to consensus for improbable events and when the consensus provided correct information, whereas Chinese children were similarly willing to change their judgment regardless of event type and the validity of the testimony. We propose that the extent of the influence of testimony on possibility judgments varies based on cultural setting. Our findings have potential applications for domains that require evaluation of counterintuitive claims, like religious and scientific education.
... Studies of "parenting by lying" show that parents in various cultures regularly communicate false beliefs to their children-saying, for example, that the police will come punish them-when other means of controlling children's behavior prove ineffective (Brown, 2002;Heyman et al., 2009Heyman et al., , 2013. Parents also tell their children that Santa Claus won't bring them any present if they misbehave (Goldstein & Woolley, 2016;Heyman et al., 2013). Across cultures, people narrate stories that emphasize the dangerous consequences of behaving selfishly, and the long-term benefits of behaving cooperatively, likely in the hope of encouraging prosocial behaviors in listeners (Du Toit 1964;Dundes 1962;Smith et al. 2017;Thompson 1946; see also Wiessner 2014). ...
Preprint
Full-text available
What explains the ubiquity and cultural success of prosocial religions? Leading accounts argue that prosocial religions evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that prosocial religious beliefs are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we propose that prosocial religions, including beliefs in moralizing gods, develop because individuals shape supernatural beliefs to achieve their goals in within-group, strategic interactions. People have a fitness interest in controlling others' cooperation-either to extort benefits from others or to gain reputational benefits for protecting the public good. Moreover, they intuitively infer that other people could be deterred from cheating if they feared supernatural punishment. Thus, people endorse supernatural punishment beliefs to manipulate others into cooperating. Prosocial religions emerge from a dynamic of mutual monitoring, in which each individual, lacking confidence in the cooperativeness of conspecifics, attempts to incentivize their cooperation by endorsing beliefs in supernatural punishment. We show how variants of this incentive structure explain the variety of cultural attractors towards which supernatural punishment converges-including extractive religions that extort benefits from exploited individuals, prosocial religions geared toward mutual benefit, and moralized forms of prosocial religion where belief in moralizing gods is itself a moral duty. We review cross-disciplinary evidence for nine predictions of this account and use it to explain the decline of prosocial religions in modern societies. Prosocial religious beliefs seem endorsed as long as people believe them necessary to ensure other people's cooperation, regardless of their objective effectiveness in doing so.
... If children do not live in an environment which fosters and supports these beliefs, including family, school, and neighborhood, these beliefs are not maintained nearly as long. But, when children live in an environment where their families go to great lengths to participate in and maintain the myths and they see elements of the myth reinforced outside their families -in stores, in media, by peers -belief can persist well into late childhood (Goldstein and Woolley, 2016). Eventually, belief does end, either through the child figuring it out on their own or being told by someone else. ...
Chapter
Engaging in pretend, imaginative, and fantastical thinking and behavior is a characteristic, but not an essential, component of typical psychological development. Indeed, there is wide variability in both how much individuals use these abilities and how interested they are in engaging them. The capacity to pretend and imagine emerges early in development and becomes more sophisticated with age. This chapter highlights aspects of childhood pretense, imagination, and fantasy, including (but not limited to) object substitution, role play, sociodramatic play, and the creation of imaginary companions and paracosms, as well as a number of correlated skills. The question of whether post-childhood activities like generating fiction and fan art, cosplay, playing role play games or acting rely on the same cognitive and social mechanisms as childhood imaginary and fantastical play is considered. Pretense, imagination, and fantastical thought and behavior can promote positive well-being, but the degree to which it does may be dependent on individual temperament and interest.
Article
Parents lie to their children, for example, to influence children's behavior and emotions ( parenting by lying ). The aim of this systematic review was to describe the current scientific literature on parental lying, including its prevalence, correlates, conceptualizations, and operationalizations. Through an extensive literature search using PRISMA guidelines, 23 eligible peer‐reviewed empirical papers on parental lying have been found. Many parents are found to lie to their children. However, existing research is characterized by a heterogeneous and narrow conceptualization and operationalization of parental lying, and a focus on problems. Following this, the current empirical evidence points mostly toward associations with maladaptive development. Following a critical analysis of the studies, future research should implement broader conceptualizations and operationalizations of parental lying in non‐retrospective, experimental, or prospective longitudinal research designs on maladaptive and adaptive correlates, to determine the significance of parental lying for children.
Article
Full-text available
Two studies examined the process and aftermath of coming to disbelieve in the myth of Santa Claus. In Study 1, 48 children ages 6–15 answered questions about how they discovered Santa was not real and how the discovery made them feel, and 44 of their parents shared their perspectives and how they promoted Santa. In Study 2, 383 adults reflected on their experiences shifting to disbelief in Santa Claus. In both studies, the average age of disbelief was around 8, but with significant variability. Most participants reported testimony from others contributed to their disbelief, and some reported skepticism as a result of either experience (e.g., observation) or logical reasoning. About a third of children and half of adults reported some negative emotions upon discovering the truth. Higher levels of parental Santa promotion were associated with experiencing some negative emotions upon discovering the truth in both studies. Additionally, adults who reported feeling only negative emotions tended to be older when they discovered the truth, more likely to have reported learning the truth abruptly, and more likely to have reported learning the truth through testimony. That said, experiences of negative emotions were generally short-lived, and the vast majority of both children and adults reported they would celebrate Santa with their own children or were already doing so. Implications of these findings for how to approach children’s transition to skepticism regarding Santa are discussed, including timing, the role of parents, and popular notions of discovery for children’s trust toward their parents.
Article
This paper argues that when young children are given an opportunity for their voice to be heard, they are competent communicators and social agents who can co-create cultural practices as theory makers. The paper draws on video recorded data from a small study that focussed on how young children (3–5 years) participated in an end-of-year cultural celebration in an early childhood education setting in Australia. The children organized a party, invited Santa Claus to visit, and setup a special place where they could hold conversations with Santa. Video recorded data of the conversations initiated by the children with Santa Claus were transcribed and analysed using the fine-grained interactional tools of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. Analyses identified children’s competence as active social agents who challenged Santa’s authenticity through checking his appearance, knowledge testing and, suggesting he was not the ‘real Santa’. This evidence of children’s capacity to authenticate cultural experiences demonstrates that incorporating children’s voice in the co-creation of culture fosters children’s opportunities to make and interrogate theory.
Book
Full-text available
The Existence Workshop: Faith Through the Prizm of Psychology Eugene Subbotsky Synopsis The aim of the book is to describe the structure and function of the inherent ability of our Self to invest objects with reality – existentialization (EXON). It is argued that all we can think and speak of, can see and hear, feel and experience – exists, but everything exists in its own way. Psychological structure and functioning of EXON is discussed and illustrated with psychological experiments. We will see how the ‘light of existence’ emitted by our Self illuminates external, perceived entities, and what components of EXON participate in this process. Next, we will analyse how our Self invests existence into imagined physical objects and into fantastical entities that have no counterparts in the perceived physical world. We will consider how EXON works on such unusual imagined entity as the almighty and omnipotent God. We will see how EXON can be tricked by stage magicians via faking existence, and how our Self ‘learns’ to make up for such trickery by developing special protective defence mechanisms. We will discover how, as a result of this development, reality is divided into two separate realms – the realm of ordinary and the realm of super-ordinary reality. We will examine how EXON can be ‘turned on itself’, and how this ‘backfiring’ of EXON can narrow down or expand the limits of our Self. Finally, we will show that EXON can be influenced with the help of special ‘psychological tools’ – the Impossible Entities (IE). As a result of such influence, we can improve people’s creative imagination, thinking and memory.
Article
Verbal testimony about reality status is critical but often contradictory. These studies address whom children consider reliable sources of information about reality and how they evaluate conflicting testimony. In Study 1, seventy 4‐ to 8‐year‐olds heard an adult or child provide testimony about how to cook food and use toys, and about the reality of unfamiliar entities. Children selected the adult for food and the child for toys. Six‐ and 8‐year‐olds also selected the adult regarding reality. In Study 2, ninety 4‐ to 8‐year‐olds heard conflicting reality information from children and adults. Six‐ to 8‐year‐olds endorsed adult and child claims differentially and stated that adults knew more. By age 6, children favor adult testimony about reality over that of children.
Article
Full-text available
In Study 1, 103 children ages 4 through 10 answered questions about their concept of and belief in luck, and completed a story task assessing their use of luck as an explanation for events. The interview captured a curvilinear trajectory of children's belief in luck from tentative belief at age 4 to full belief at age 6, weakening belief at age 8, and significant skepticism by age 10. The youngest children appeared to think of luck simply as a positive outcome; with age, children increasingly considered the unexpected nature of lucky outcomes and many came to view luck as synonymous with chance. On the story task, younger children attributed a stronger role to luck in explaining events than did older children. Studies 2 and 3 explored 2 potential sources of children's concepts. Study 2 explored adult use of the words luck and lucky, and found that most of this input consisted in using lucky to refer to positive outcomes, although the nature of use changed with the ages of the children. In Study 3, we examined children's storybooks about luck and found them to be rich potential sources of children's concepts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Article
For centuries, Santa Claus has proved to be a pervasive, persistent and influential mythic figure who dominates children’s lives for several weeks each year. But unlike most other fantasy figures, Santa Claus is presented as a real entity, a feat achieved through the widespread deception of children. This deception primarily involves a child’s family, but is also encouraged and maintained by wider society and its institutions. That educators could involve themselves in such a deception seems particularly controversial. Given their role as providers of epistemic goods, it appears like a dereliction of duty for them to seemingly encourage credulity and to deceive their students to maintain their false beliefs. However, I argue that there are epistemic benefits that can reaped by children through their experience of believing in Santa Claus and the process of independently disabusing themselves of these beliefs. For these benefits to be attained, educators must reluctantly engage in low-level paternalistic deception to keep their students in the dark about the truth, before then actively helping them to learn important epistemic lessons and foster key intellectual virtues as a result of their experiences. This justifies educators’ modest involvement in the Santa Claus deception.
Article
Full-text available
To what extent do children believe in real, unreal, natural and supernatural figures relative to each other, and to what extent are features of culture responsible for belief? Are some figures, like Santa Claus or an alien, perceived as more real than figures like Princess Elsa or a unicorn? We categorized 13 figures into five a priori categories based on 1) whether children receive direct evidence of the figure’s existence, 2) whether children receive indirect evidence of the figure’s existence, 3) whether the figure was associated with culture-specific rituals or norms, and 4) whether the figure was explicitly presented as fictional. We anticipated that the categories would be endorsed in the following order: ‘Real People’ (a person known to the child, The Wiggles), ‘Cultural Figures’ (Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, The Tooth Fairy), ‘Ambiguous Figures’ (Dinosaurs, Aliens), ‘Mythical Figures’ (unicorns, ghosts, dragons), and ‘Fictional Figures’ (Spongebob Squarepants, Princess Elsa, Peter Pan). In total, we analysed responses from 176 children (aged 2–11 years) and 56 adults for ‘how real’ they believed 13 individual figures were (95 children were examined online by their parents, and 81 children were examined by trained research assistants). A cluster analysis, based exclusively on children’s ‘realness’ scores, revealed a structure supporting our hypotheses, and multilevel regressions revealed a sensible hierarchy of endorsement with differing developmental trajectories for each category of figures. We advance the argument that cultural rituals are a special form of testimony that influences children’s reality/fantasy distinctions, and that rituals and norms for ‘Cultural Figures’ are a powerful and under-researched factor in generating and sustaining a child’s endorsement for a figure’s reality status. All our data and materials are publically available at https://osf.io/wurxy/.
Article
Preschoolers' fantasy–reality distinctions vary by the emotional content of the information; they report that happy and sad fantastic or real events can occur more often than frightening events. Given that children rely on parents' testimony when evaluating information, the present study examined the role parents play in children's fantasy–reality distinctions for emotionally charged events. Fifty‐nine parents and their 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds read happy, frightening, and sad stories that contained either fantastic or real events. Conversations during the readings were coded and analysed for patterns across story conditions. Findings reveal that topics of conversations differed significantly by discrete emotion and at times by reality status. Parents and children engaged with happy and sad events (e.g., by relating events to children's lives and helping the story characters) and distanced themselves from frightening events (e.g., by ameliorating the situation and switching negative tone to positive). Findings provide new insights into how parents talk to children about emotionally charged fantasy and reality that contribute to our understanding of how children construct their understanding of real and unreal information. Highlights • The study examined parent–child conversations about happy, frightening, and sad fantastic and real events. • While reading stories, parents and children interacted with the happy and sad events and distanced themselves from the frightening events. • Conversations about fantasy and reality may influence children's fantasy–reality distinctions.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Realistic acting surrounds us on television, movies and on stages. It is the dominant form of play seen in Western culture, and yet we do not have a psychology of how children and adults understand the dual nature of acting—the actor and his/her character. In a two studies, we investigated how adults and children understand the personality, skills, emotional states and physical characteristics of actors while they portray characters, and if they confuse actors with their characters. We explored when children develop the capacity to distinguish actors from the characteristics they portray and how and when adults continue to confuse actors and characters. Children do not seem to understand acting until at least five years old, when they begin to distinguish how and when traits transfer. Adults too judge that states and traits transfer, but distinguish between different kinds of characteristics in their judgments.
Article
Full-text available
Children and adults are presented with a special case of the unreal on a daily basis: realistic acting. Although the realistic portrayal of characters is a widespread activity, psychologists know little about how children understand acting, especially the differences between actors and the characters they play. In two studies we tested whether children believe that actors actually possess the physical and emotional states they enact. We found that 3- and 4-year-old children (but not 5-year-old children) fail to appreciate that what happens to a character on screen does not also happen to the actor in real life. We also found that, unlike adults, children tend to favor a nonrealistic portrayal over a realistic one when asked which better depicts a characteristic. These studies can provide a new lens on children's knowledge about portrayals of mental and emotional states in pretend worlds, as well as on their ability to quarantine the world of the unreal.
Article
Full-text available
Research and common lore suggest that children subscribe to a rich world of fantasy, including beliefs about magical entities and events. This study explores how children use magic to explain events they witness in the real world. 16 children (aged 4, 6, and 8 yrs) were asked a set of interview questions designed to assess general magical beliefs. They were then presented with physical events and were asked to predict and explain their occurrence and to state whether they believed the events were magical. The extent of Ss' magical beliefs, as measured by the interview, decreased with age. Regarding explanations of events, the availability of correct physical explanations for the events accounted for a significant portion of the variance in Ss' claims that the events were magic. Findings suggest that magic is used by children as an explanatory tool when they encounter events that both violate their expectations and elude adequate physical explanation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
Full-text available
Young children are often thought to confuse fantasy and reality. This study took a second look at preschoolers' fantasy/reality differentiation. We employed a new measure of fantasy/reality differentiation—a property attribution task—in which children were questioned regarding the properties of both real and fantastical entities. We also modified the standard forced-choice categorization task (into real/fantastical) to include a ‘not sure’ option, thus allowing children to express uncertainty. Finally, we assessed the relation between individual levels of fantasy orientation and fantasy/reality differentiation. Results suggest that children have a more developed appreciation of the boundary between fantasy and reality than is often supposed.
Article
Full-text available
In four experiments, 4-, 5-, 6- and 9-year-old children and adults were tested on the entrenchment of their magical beliefs and their beliefs in the universal power of physical causality. In Experiment 1, even 4-year-olds showed some understanding of the difference between ordinary and anomalous (magical) causal events, but only 6-year-olds and older participants denied that magic could occur in real life. When shown an anomalous causal event (a transformation of a physical object in an apparently empty box after a magic spell was cast on the box), 4- and 6-year-olds accepted magical explanations of the event, whereas 9-year-olds and adults did not. In Experiment 2, the same patterns of behaviour as above were shown by 6- and 9-year-olds who demonstrated an understanding of the difference between genuine magical events and similarly looking tricks. Testing the entrenchment of magical beliefs in this experiment showed that 5-year-olds tended to retain their magical explanations of the anomalous event, even after the mechanism of the trick had been explained to them, whereas 6- and 9-year-olds did not. In Experiment 3, adult participants refused to accept magical explanations of the anomalous event and interpreted it as a trick or an illusion, even after this event was repeated 4 times. Yet, when in Experiment 4 similar anomalous causal events were demonstrated without reference to magic, most adults acknowledged, both in their verbal judgments and in their actions, that the anomalous effects were not a fiction but had really occurred. The data of this study suggest that in the modern industrialized world, magical beliefs persist but are disguised to fit the dominant scientific paradigm.
Article
Full-text available
In this study we assessed children's ability to use information overheard in other people's conversations to judge the reality status of a novel entity. Three- to 9-year-old children (N = 101) watched video clips in which two adults conversed casually about a novel being. Videos contained statements that either explicitly denied, explicitly affirmed, or implicitly acknowledged the entity's existence. Results indicated that children of all ages used statements of denial to discount the reality status of the novel entity, but that this ability improved with age. By age 5, children used implicit existence cues to judge a novel entity as being real. Not until age 9, however, did children begin to doubt the existence of entities whose reality status was explicitly affirmed in conversation. Overall, results indicate that the ability to use conversational cues to determine reality status is present in some children as early as age 3, but recognition of the nuanced language of belief continues to develop during the elementary-school years.
Article
Full-text available
Each fictional world that adults create has its own distinct properties, separating it from other fictional worlds. Here we explore whether this separation also exists for young children's pretend game worlds. Studies 1 and 1A set up two simultaneous games and encouraged children to create appropriate pretend identities for coloured blocks. When prompted with a situation that required the use of a Game 1 object in Game 2, 3- and 4-year-olds were reluctant to move pretend objects between games, even when the alternative-world object was explicitly highlighted as a possible choice. Study 2 found the same effect when the two game worlds were presented sequentially. This suggests that, even for young children, multiple pretend game worlds are kept psychologically separate.
Article
Full-text available
The developmental progression of children's belief in three major figures of early childhood was examined through structure interviews with children and questionnaires for parents. Belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy varied with the child's age and the level of parental encouragement of belief. However, belief in these figures was unrelated to other indices of the child's fantasy involvement.
Article
Full-text available
Factors hypothesized to affect beliefs in fantastical beings were examined by introducing children to a novel fantastical entity, the Candy Witch. Results revealed that among older preschoolers, children who were visited by the Candy Witch exhibited stronger beliefs in the Candy Witch than did those who were not. Among children who were visited, older children had stronger beliefs than did younger children. Among children who were not visited, those with a high Fantasy Orientation believed more strongly than did those with a low Fantasy Orientation. Belief remained high one year later. At both time points, the number of other fantastical beings in which a child believed was significantly related to belief in the Candy Witch.
Article
Full-text available
The present study investigated the development of possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a variety of extraordinary events could or could not occur in real life. Although children of all ages denied the possibility of events that adults also judged impossible, children frequently denied the possibility of events that adults judged improbable but not impossible. Three additional experiments varied the manner in which possibility judgments were elicited and confirmed the robustness of preschoolers' tendency to judge improbable events impossible. Overall, it is argued that children initially mistake their inability to imagine circumstances that would allow an event to occur for evidence that no such circumstances exist.
Article
How can we explain children's understanding of the unseen world? Young children are generally able to distinguish between real unobservable entities and fantastical ones, but they attribute different characteristics to and show less confidence in their decisions about fantastical entities generally endorsed by adults, such as Santa Claus. One explanation for these conceptual differences is that the testimony children hear from others about unobservable entities varies in meaningful ways. Although this theory has some experimental support, its viability in actual conversation has yet to be investigated. Study 1 sought to examine this question in parent-child conversation and showed that parents provide similar types of content information when talking to children about both real entities and entities that they generally endorse. However, parents use different pragmatic cues when they communicate about endorsed entities than they do when talking about real ones. Study 2 showed that older siblings used discourse strategies similar to those used by parents when talking to young children about unobservable entities. These studies indicate that the types of cues children use to form their conceptions of unobservable entities are present in naturalistic conversations with others, supporting a role for testimony in children's early beliefs.
Article
Jewish children (N = 140, aged 3 to 10 years) enrolled in Jewish Sunday schools or preschools were individually administered a structured interview about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Their parents (primarily Reform denomination) completed a self-administered questionnaire on their own attitudes toward these figures and toward Jewish tradition. Children's belief in both figures declined with age. Contrary to expectations, Jewish children believed in both figures equally regardless of parental encouragement, the child's behavioral participation in the myths, or parental commitment to Jewish tradition. Moreover, in comparison with previous studies of Christian children, Jewish children believed significantly less in not only Santa Claus but also the Tooth Fairy.
Article
Far from being the uncritical believers young children have been portrayed as, children often exhibit skepticism toward the reality status of novel entities and events. This article reviews research on children's reality status judgments, testimony use, understanding of possibility, and religious cognition. When viewed from this new perspective it becomes apparent that when assessing reality status, children are as likely to doubt as they are to believe. It is suggested that immature metacognitive abilities are at the root of children's skepticism, specifically that an insufficient ability to evaluate the scope and relevance of one's knowledge leads to an overreliance on it in evaluating reality status. With development comes increasing ability to utilize a wider range of sources to inform reality status judgments.
Article
recent work in developmental psychology has shown that young children explain and predict behaviour in terms of every-day mental concepts, notably beliefs and desires / from this evidence, some have concluded that children adopt a theory of mind / I shall argue instead that children engage in an increasingly sophisticated process of mental simulation that allows them to make quasi-theoretical predictions mental simulation depends on the capacity to engage in two successive steps: (1) to imagine having a particular desire of belief, and (2) to imagine the actions, thoughts or emotions that would ensue if one were to have those desires or beliefs / the products of such a simulation can then be attributed to other people who do have the simulated desires or beliefs my analysis incorporates the notion of role-taking . . . but seeks to show how such a process might operate in early childhood / it provides a framework for interpreting two reasonably well-established facts: (1) the increasing accuracy with which children can diagnose mental states, and (2) the deficits shown by autistic children in making such diagnoses the capacity for pretence / reasoning with pretend premises / altering default settings (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
Assessed conceptions about 4- to 6-yr-old children's beliefs in magical and fantasy figures by means of a parent survey. 70 parents reported that children believe in the reality of a number of fantasy figures and that they encourage these beliefs to some degree. In Study 2, 24 4- and 5-yr-old Ss made a clear distinction between possible and impossible transformations of animals and did not invoke magical means to produce any outcome. In Study 3, 20 Ss (aged 4–5 yrs) were asked if a magician could cause certain animal transformations. Ss made no distinction between possible and impossible events, reporting that for a magician none of these events was impossible. Few Ss said that magicians used trickery, instead suggesting that real magic was involved. Results suggest that children hold a belief in magic, but not an overwhelming magical orientation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
Young children are often viewed as being unable to differentiate fantasy from reality. This article reviews research on both children's and adults beliefs about' fantasy as well as their tendency to engage in what is thought of as “magical thinking.” It is suggested that children are not fundamentally different from adults in their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality: Both children and adults entertain fantastical beliefs and also engage in magical thinking. Suggestions are offered as to how children and adults may differ in this domain, and an agenda for future research is offered.
Article
The words real, really and pretend are used in developmental research paradigms to reflect both the notions of ‘authenticity’ (in pretense-reality and appearance-reality research) and ‘existence’ (in fantasy-reality research). The current study explored whether children also expressed these notions in their everyday uses of real, really, and pretend. Mothers were interviewed and kept diary records, resulting in data for a younger group of children (2- to 3-year-olds, N=80) and an older group (4- to 7-year-olds, N=101). Utterances were analysed according to different uses of the target words and the topic of conversation in which they occurred. The words real, really, and pretend were used by both the younger and older age groups predominantly to consider the authenticity of things around them. Expression of the notion of existence was less common, particularly among the younger children. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to children's performance in experimental studies, particularly those that intend to question children's understanding of the fantasy-reality distinction.
Article
Guidelines for submitting commentsPolicy: Comments that contribute to the discussion of the article will be posted within approximately three business days. We do not accept anonymous comments. Please include your email address; the address will not be displayed in the posted comment. Cell Press Editors will screen the comments to ensure that they are relevant and appropriate but comments will not be edited. The ultimate decision on publication of an online comment is at the Editors' discretion. Formatting: Please include a title for the comment and your affiliation. Note that symbols (e.g. Greek letters) may not transmit properly in this form due to potential software compatibility issues. Please spell out the words in place of the symbols (e.g. replace “α” with “alpha”). Comments should be no more than 8,000 characters (including spaces ) in length. References may be included when necessary but should be kept to a minimum. Be careful if copying and pasting from a Word document. Smart quotes can cause problems in the form. If you experience difficulties, please convert to a plain text file and then copy and paste into the form.
Article
Do preschoolers think adults know more about everything than children? Or do they recognize that there are some things that children might know more about than adults? Three-, four-, and five-year-olds (N = 65) were asked to decide whether an adult or child informant would better be able to answer a variety of questions about the nutritional value of foods and about toys. Children at all ages chose to direct the food questions to the adult and the toy questions to the child. Thus, there are some kinds of information for which preschoolers expect that a child would be a better informant than an adult.
Article
Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy—is there still a place for these imaginary creatures in today's skeptical society? More importantly, is it appropriate to encourage children to believe in these myths? In Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith, Cindy Dell Clark went straight to children and their parents for the answers. Using their insights, she offers fresh, new interpretations of the cultural and psychological roles these figures play in children's lives. Complete with children's vivid testimonies and colorful illustrations, this book is a revealing journey into a child's mind and world. "A very enjoyable read, this book is a seriously researched record of children's myths, written with the observant accuracy of an anthropologist."—Nadja Reissland, Common Knowledge "Clark posits some novel interpretations as well as intriguing glimpses for parents, teachers, and psychologists into the ways children shape our culture rather than merely being passive inheritors of it."—Booklist
Article
Children's toys provide a rich arena for investigating conceptual flexibility, because they often can be understood as possessing an individual identity at multiple levels of abstraction. For example, many dolls (e.g., Winnie-the-Pooh) and action figures (e.g., Batman) can be construed either as characters from a fictional world or as physical objects in the real world. In two experiments, 72 4- and 5-year-olds took part in a property extension task, the results of which provide evidence of an understanding that (1) two representations of a character share certain properties in virtue of their shared character identity, and this sharing does not stem simply from having the same name, and (2) one representation of a character is more likely to share properties with another representation of the character if the properties were acquired by the character than if they were acquired by the representation. Children's understanding of a representational object's abstract character identity thus enabled them to transcend using its unique spatio-temporal history as a sole basis for inferring its idiosyncratic properties.
Article
AbstractSeventy-two children (24 each from preschool, first, and third grades) were individually administered a structured interview assessing their belief in Santa Claus, as well as measures of causal reasoning and fantasy predisposition. Belief in Santa declined markedly with age. Level of causal reasoning increased with age and was related to decline in belief in Santa. Belief in Santa was unrelated to fantasy predisposition. Results were discussed within the framework of Gould's cognitive-affective theory of development which emphasizes the coexistence of several levels of cognitive maturity as the child learns to distinguish reality from make-believe.
Article
Fifty-two children who no longer believed in Santa Claus were individually administered a structured interview on their reactions to discovering the truth. Their parents completed a questionnaire assessing their initial encouragement of the child to believe in Santa and rating their child's reactions to discovering the truth as well as their own reactions to the child's discovery. Parental encouragement for the child to believe was very strong. Children generally discovered the truth on their own at age seven. Children reported predominantly positive reactions on learning the truth. Parents, however, described themselves as predominantly sad in reaction to their child's discovery.
Article
Young children are often viewed as being unable to differentiate fantasy from reality. This article reviews research on both children's and adults' beliefs about fantasy as well as their tendency to engage in what is thought of as "magical thinking." It is suggested that children are not fundamentally different from adults in their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality: Both children and adults entertain fantastical beliefs and also engage in magical thinking. Suggestions are offered as to how children and adults may differ in this domain, and an agenda for future research is offered.
Article
Young children reliably distinguish reality from fantasy; they know that their friends are real and that Batman is not. But it is an open question whether they appreciate, as adults do, that there are multiple fantasy worlds. We test this by asking children and adults about fictional characters' beliefs about other characters who exist either within the same world (e.g., Batman and Robin) or in different worlds (e.g., Batman and SpongeBob). Study 1 found that although both adults and young children distinguish between within-world and across-world types of character relationships, the children make an unexpected mistake: they often claim that Batman thinks that Robin is make believe. Study 2 used a less explicit task, exploring intuitions about the actions of characters-whom they could see, touch, and talk to--and found that children show a mature appreciation of the ontology of fictional worlds.
Article
In three experiments, children's reliance on other people's testimony as compared to their own, first-hand experience was assessed in the domain of ontology. Children ranging from 4 to 8 years were asked to judge whether five different types of entity exist: real entities (e.g. cats, trees) whose existence is evident to everyone; scientific entities (e.g. germs, oxygen) that are normally invisible but whose existence is generally presupposed in everyday discourse; endorsed beings (e.g. the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus) whose existence is typically endorsed in discourse with young children; equivocal beings (e.g. monsters, witches) whose existence is not typically endorsed in discourse with young children; and impossible entities (e.g. flying pigs, barking cats) that nobody believes in. Children make a broad dichotomy between entities and beings that they claim to exist (real entities; scientific entities; and endorsed beings) and those whose existence they deny (equivocal beings and impossible entities). They also make a more fine-grained distinction among the invisible entities that they claim to exist. Thus, they assert the existence of scientific entities such as germs with more confidence than that of endorsed beings such as Santa Claus. The findings confirm that children's ontological claims extend beyond their first-hand encounters with instances of a given category. Children readily believe in entities that they cannot see for themselves but have been told about. Their confidence in the existence of those entities appears to vary with the pattern of testimony that they receive.
Article
The goal of this research was to assess children's beliefs about the reality status of storybook characters and events. In Experiment 1, 156 preschool age children heard realistic, fantastical, or religious stories, and their understanding of the reality status of the characters and events in the stories was assessed. Results revealed that 3-year-olds were more likely to judge characters as real than were 4- and 5-year-olds, but most children judged all characters as not real for all story types. Children of all ages who heard realistic stories made more claims that the events in the stories could happen in real life than did children who heard fantastical stories. Five-year-olds made significantly more claims that events in religious stories could happen in real life than did younger children. In Experiment 2, 136 4- and 5-year-olds heard similar stories. Results replicated those from Experiment 1, and also indicated a growing awareness of the basic nature of realistic fiction.
Article
Humans construe their environment as composed largely of discrete individuals, which are also members of kinds (e.g., trees, cars, and people). On what basis do young children determine individual identity? How important are featural properties (e.g., physical appearance, name) relative to spatiotemporal history? Two studies examined the relative importance of these factors in preschoolers' and adults' identity judgments. Participants were shown pairs of individuals who looked identical but differed in their spatiotemporal history (e.g., two physically distinct but identical Winnie-the-Pooh dolls), and were asked whether both members in the pair would have access to knowledge that had been supplied to only one of the pairs. The results provide clear support for spatiotemporal history as the primary basis of identity judgments in both preschoolers and adults, and further place issues of identity within the broader cognitive framework of psychological essentialism.
Play, dreams, and imagination in children
  • J Piaget
Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams, and imagination in children. New York: Norton.
I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV: children and adult's understanding of acting
  • T R Goldstein
  • P Bloom
Goldstein, T. R., & Bloom, P. (2015). Characterizing characters: how children make sense of realistic acting. Cognitive Development, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2014.12.001. Special Issue: Cognizing the Unreal Goldstein, T. R. (2014). I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV: children and adult's understanding of acting. Conference Proceedings of the 2014 Biennial Congress of the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics.